bodypainting: Star Trek – various Orions

Star Trek: various Orions

Orions are known for their distinctive green skin. Orion males are typically bald and, on average, taller and more muscular than an average Human male. Orion females are very animalistic in nature, known for their extreme carnal appetites and their innate skill of seduction: they are thought to be kept in slavery by the males. The Human male can rarely resist the alluring dance of an Orion slave-girl.

In the Star Trek: Enterprise episode ‘Bound’ their slavery was revealed to be only a pretence that allows them to conquer other species by deception. The females are sold on the Orion slave market allowing them easy access to new targets for their unique physiology: very soon the ‘owner’ begins taking orders from his new ‘slave’.

However, Gaila in the rebooted Star Trek movie was said to have escaped the life of an Orion slave girl through ‘an underground railroad’; this appears to subvert the standard history as the movie is set a hundred years after the truth about the Orions had supposedly been discovered.

The Orions

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013): Featured an Orion in San Francisco. Coming soon…

Star Trek (2009): In a deleted scene Kirk apologies to the wrong Orion Science Officer (Diora Baird) thinking he is speaking to Gaila – I guess all green girls look the same. Diora Baird got a fair amount of publicity about being an Orion in Star Trek but then what seems to have been her only scene was cut. Mindy Hall was the makeup department head; Debra Coleman was the assistant makeup department head; Barney Burman (Proteus FX) was the prosthetic makeup designer; Joel Harlow (HarlowFX) the prosthetic makeup supervisor who was responsible for the Vulcans, Romulans, and Klingons. I believe that it was at Barney Burman’s suggestions that Orions became redheads in the reboot.